Use of mobile devices is increasing as global usage patterns shift toward content consumption, creation and management on mobile devices. However, mobile devices are a poor platform for data preservation. They are easily damaged or rendered inoperable, often resulting in loss of locally stored content or data. Inaccessible data and content following failure of the mobile device may be due to technical reasons or insufficient data backup functions.
Additionally, users of mobile devices upgrade their devices frequently. In setting up a new device, the user experience is often hindered due to loss of application data and associated settings. This can require the user to set up a new device from scratch and may result in the loss of important data associated with third-party applications, such as text messages, photos, application preferences, or any other suitable third-party application data. Existing backup technologies often rely on the use of key-value pairs, which only back up certain aspects of third-party application data. Using key-value pairs for restoring a third-party application to a client device may restore application settings, but may not restore additional content of the third-party application. Thus a third-party application with settings backed up and saved as key-value pairs may result in the restoration of the third-party application environment according to user settings, but the loss of third-party application content generated or stored in the third-party application by the user. Moreover, existing systems may require developers of third-party applications to specifically configure the third-party applications to allow backup, or require the user to opt in to the backup or trigger the backup manually.